


Twist

by ForsythiaRising



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Adora gets to have nice things, Bow gets to have a break, But mostly fluff, Canon Compliant, Catra gets to have nice things, F/F, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Glimmer gets to have a dad, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 05, Shadow Weaver | Light Spinner (She-Ra)'s A+ Parenting, a variety of fiber and fiber-adjacent arts, but only around the edges, but they're fantasy sheep so they're blue, character studies disguised as whatever the fuck this is, is this more or less niche than the arthurian au?, the fluff is from sheep
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-23
Updated: 2020-12-23
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:14:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28270737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ForsythiaRising/pseuds/ForsythiaRising
Summary: “Why do you think Aunt Casta’s so obsessed with knitting? They have all this crap everywhere; knitting needles and crochet hooks and spindles and bins of embroidery thread and looms and—”“Not a fan?” Micah asks, tamping down on a sting of disappointment when his daughter shakes her head. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. Why, some of the finest sorcerers have been named after these arts. Obviously, you’d know—“He stops abruptly, catching his own words with a grimace. Adora has gone tense, her hand frozen where it rests on the bulbous end of a spindle. Catra, still down the hall with studied disinterest, has gone even tenser.—The Best Friends Squad & fiber art.
Relationships: Adora & Bow & Catra & Glimmer (She-Ra), Adora/Catra (She-Ra), Bow/Glimmer (She-Ra)
Comments: 76
Kudos: 200





	Twist

**Author's Note:**

> This is an odd one, folks. I saw a lot of fanart & content involving Catra and yarn a while back (because CAT) and next thing I had this writing bug so intense it was more of a writing demon and it needed to get exorcised and it is...not what i usually write. So if this is not your jam and the other stuff I’ve written IS your jam, there is def more where that came from in my drafts folder. Insofar as I know I am not going through a blue period over here, just needed to get these particular words out in this order before I could unstick my writing brain. It is, by far, the most self indulgent thing I have ever written in my life. And I wrote poetry in college.
> 
> I know some people have visual brains, and I consider spinning a very tactile/visual art. If you want an example you can see with your eyeballs, [here’s a video of how spinning on a support spindle can go (if you know what you’re doing).](https://youtu.be/Nro8MTJlgBg?t=386) I started it smack in the middle so you don’t have to watch the prep stuff, but that’s nice too if you’re in the mood to watch something calm. This is absolutely not necessary for the reading experience.
> 
> And finally but also most importantly, thank you thank you thank you to [Urist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Urist) (who took time out of writing catradora medieval shenanigans to listen to me scream about yarn), [ChromeEdwardian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChromeEdwardian) (whose edits I have a habit of rejecting and then adding back in two min later), and the other wonderful folks I threw this draft at to beta. They are very patient and kind and helped me work my expansive relationship with both fiber and the Best Friends Squad into something that might even be intelligible to other people.

_“Here is how spinning works,” Micah says. He ignores the wall of spindles for the moment and, instead, tugs a bit of fluff off the pile that sits in a basket under it. It’s the natural pale blue of the sheep that live in the Whispering Woods, already cleaned and combed and prepared into a thick poof of tiny fibers, soft between his fingers._

_He presents it to his haphazard audience of four. This is something he wants to show them, he finds, here on what started as Catra’s first tour of Mystacor and became his own reorientation, long overdue. He likes the idea of sharing this with his daughter, even if she looks bored, and Bow and Adora’s attentive gazes are enough to spur him on. Catra herself is wandering further down the hall, looking at a painting while Micah continues to pretend he doesn’t notice her ear cocked his way._

_“You take a bit of fiber, like this,” he says, “and you pull it until you get this long, even line of fluff, instead of a poof. That’s called drafting.” He grips the blue fiber in the fingers of each hand, leaving a few inches in the middle, and tugs gently on both sides - as described, the fiber thins, goes from thick and plush to thin and wispy._

_“Then,” he continues, “when you get it thin enough, you twist it.” He rolls his fingers on one side, and hundreds of fine fiber strands twist together into something tighter, less fluffy and more substantive. Micah tugs on both sides, and the line of fiber - so easy to pull apart a moment ago - holds firm. He grins, triumphant, “And there you go! That’s how you make yarn. The basics, anyway.”_

_Bow is watching the process avidly, but Micah can tell he’s lost Adora. Her eyes have drifted to the spindle wall, catching on the weighted whorls of the drop spindles and the blunted tips of the support spindles. “You’re wondering what those are for, I take it?”_

_“There are so_ many!” _Adora says._

 _It’s Glimmer who answers, impatient. “You can’t do all that,” she flaps her hand at the process Micah just demonstrated, “with your fingers. The sorcerers use yarn stuff to_ ‘ learn control,’" _she puts air quotes around the words, rolls her eyes. “Why do you think Aunt Casta’s so obsessed with knitting? They have all this crap everywhere; knitting needles and crochet hooks and spindles and bins of embroidery thread and looms and—”_

_“Not a fan?” Micah asks, tamping down on a sting of disappointment when his daughter shakes her head. “I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. Why, some of the finest sorcerers have been named after these arts. Obviously, you’d know—“_

_He stops abruptly, catching his own words with a grimace. Adora has gone tense, her hand frozen where it rests on the bulbous end of a spindle. Catra, still down the hall with studied disinterest, has gone even tenser._

_“...But enough of all that, I’d say you’ve humored an old man enough.” A recovery for himself, a peace offering for them. “You’d rather be at the beach, wouldn’t you?”_

_They would, and Micah lingers as his daughter and her friends skip off to more exciting things. He lets the fiber in his hand untwist - it won’t hold, not without the aid of a spindle - and tucks it carefully back into the formless mass from whence it came. He chuckles at the tiny strands that have migrated and clung to his shirt, and he’s picking at them when he realizes he’s not alone in the hall._

_“She used these, huh?”_

_It’s Catra, arms crossed tight across her chest and eyes fixed on the wall, jutting her chin forward to indicate the array of spindles. Her face is impassive, but the hunched curl of the strange alien cat at her feet gives her discomfort away._

_Micah takes stock of her, this young woman he doesn’t yet know well, and sees in her - not himself, but a stolen, painful kind of youth he’d only barely flirted with. He shakes his head. “No. She wouldn’t, at least when I knew her. The principle she liked, but the tools - she didn’t make yarn, didn’t like_ training _. Called it all stupid and used to give Casta hell. She didn’t see the point, I think, not when it doesn’t have—“_

_”—power.” Catra finishes. Micah nods, one firm jerk of his head._

_They stand there together for a long moment, gazing at a wall of arcane tools that are really just fancy sticks, a strange camaraderie in the thick weight of a dead woman between them. Catra reaches out a claw-tipped finger, runs it along the dull top point of one of the simpler, half-full support spindles, then down over the yarn wrapped around the shaft, fingering the loose, unfinished end where the yarn devolves into a fluffy mass of unspun fiber. Micah opens his mouth to say something, but he doesn’t know what, so he closes it again. They part soon after._

_That could be the end of it._

_Except, it’s not._

* * *

There’s a time, between space and Etheria and space again, when Bow doesn’t make any arrows. He likes them, of course he does, but he opens his design book one day not long after the Heart and for all that he knows these designs are helpful, are made to do things like carry messages and spread confetti and double as pens, all he can see is the sharp pointy painful tip, made for damage. He closes the book, and he doesn’t open it for a while, the same way he doesn’t make any more of the miniature figures they’d used for tactical planning and doesn’t even really do tech upgrades, except for the ones necessary to Etheria’s reconstruction. So it’s maybe not surprising he finds himself restless, finds his _hands_ restless, in meetings and at dinner and late at night when Glimmer groans and hits him with a pillow and orders him to _go to sleep already, won’t you?_ _._ And, well, Castaspella is always around, in those days, doing her best to be helpful with a smile and a chirpy word and a basket of yarn. 

Which is to say: the war ends, and Bow picks up knitting. 

It’s a technical act, he finds, full of precise, small movements and intricate choices. Is the yarn in front or in back, how many times is it twirled around the needle, exactly which loop is the needle tip going in and in what direction. Move a bit of yarn here or an extra needle there, get a beautiful pattern; miss a stitch sliding off the end of a needle and it unravels all the way down. 

(This happens, once - many times, actually, but once very badly - on the first scarf he tries to make for Glimmer. He makes the mistake on the second to last row and is too intent on learning how to finish the piece to notice it until he’s holding it up in front of his friends with gleeful pride. They all notice it at the same time, and Bow and Glimmer and Adora stare at the long, messy rungs of yarn where the stitch has dropped, everyone seeing it and no one wanting to _say_ it. Except Catra does, of course, snorts out a “you _suck_ _,_ Arrow Boy,” as she laughs and laughs, and Bow can do nothing but laugh too, and then Adora and Glimmer join in.

They decide to keep it that way, ultimately; Castaspella gives him a weird look when he asks her to show him how to stop the run without fixing it, but she only argues a little. They sew it into place with a thick yarn needle, and Glimmer parades the thing around the castle nonstop, delighting in telling anyone who asks - and, when everyone fails to ask, anyone who will listen - about her boyfriend the artist. Bow likes it, and he likes even more the way its dangling ends brush against his arms when he kisses her, the way its softness is useless for anything but keeping warm, the way it presses between them when he draws her closer.)

He gets better at it, and on his next birthday Glimmer and Adora and even Catra give him needles: sets and sets of long knitting needles, some thick and some thin and in a riot of different colors. They wrap each pair individually and dump the whole pile on him in an avalanche of long, thin, sparkly packages. He’s laughing at the silliness of it all and opening the fourth one when he finally gets it, realizes that one pair is aqua-shiny and another pink-and-green swirl and another just red, that one is purple metal and another blue set has little red flames embossed on it, that the last box is bigger and has three sets: red and black, gold and red and white, pink and sparkling. There’s a picture of the whole alliance tucked in the bottom of that box, and he can’t stop staring at how well the people in it match - to the needles, sure, but also to each other, in the way of people who are happy to be together. 

At the end of the night - after he _cries,_ because of course he cries, but it’s a happy cry, and he laughs even more - he places them carefully in a chest at the end of his bed, next to a stack of tech pads and his bow, next to arrows for magnifying and exploding and sliming, next to a set of small figurines and tiny brushes and paint. They look nice there, rainbow pointed ends sticking out, and he takes a moment just to look. _Weapons for peacetime,_ he thinks, then laughs to himself, and closes the lid. 

* * *

_Here is how spinning works: the spindle balances on its pointed tip; it’ll fall over unless it’s in motion, it’ll move until it falls over. Spin it too slow, the fiber doesn’t twist tight enough; too fast, risk losing control. Pull the fiber too skinny, it has no substance; too thick and the twist won’t take. Too much tension and it snaps apart hard; too little and it falls apart softly. Wind the yarn around the shaft - too tight, and expect stiff hands; too loose and watch it all slide off into a tangle. An attempted undo - twirling the spindle back the other direction - makes something still stringy, but sure to go to pieces; there’s no recapturing the aimless fluff the fiber once was. Best to just keep moving forward. First pieces are lumpy, awkward or discarded, inconsistent; full of corkscrewed bits where there’s a lot of twist and puffy places where there‘s only a little._

_Too much twist, and it breaks. Not enough, it never becomes anything at all._

* * *

“What about this one? What do you think?” 

“Hmm?” Glimmer jolts back to herself, eyes momentarily ripped away from the woman weaving in the corner and back to her dad. He’s holding up a spindle in a riot of colors, a striped pink and blue shaft with a bright yellow disk on the end. Glimmer wrinkles her nose. “She’ll hate it,” she says. 

“It’s nice that you care about finding one she'll like.” 

Glimmer snorts, “Just don’t tell her that,” then thinks, and adds, “If anything, tell her I really _really_ wanted that one. Actually, give it back, I wanna see her face.” 

Her dad rolls his eyes, puts the garish spindle away. “Well, no, not now I know she won’t like it. I don’t suppose you have any _real_ suggestions?” 

Honestly, she doesn’t. She has in her arms a pair of size eleven knitting needles for Bow and a bundle of undyed fabric for Adora - those are easy enough, it’s not like there are that many options. But this isn’t her world, and she doesn’t know what to do with this wall of spindles in every shape and size and material. “You’re _sure_ Catra wants to try this,” she says, knowing that she’s stalling. 

Her dad clearly knows too, because he gives her a look in place of a response. Glimmer sighs. She tries to look back to the spindles, really she does, but once again she’s drawn to the sorceress in the corner, a serene orange-haired stranger sitting at a loom all strung up with pinkish-red thread, concentrated and elegant as she weaves the shuttle through the strands with expert precision, tapping the new line gently into place with a long comb. 

“I could teach you, if you like.”

She turns at her dad’s voice, sees that this time he’s followed her distracted gaze. She opens her mouth, glancing back at the weaver before she speaks. 

It’s not an art of elaborate schemes, weaving, but of simple, innocuous gestures that deftly place each piece where the artist has decided it belongs, locks it in until it doesn’t believe it could ever go anywhere else; it’s the base for a kind of spellwork that takes an admirable skill. She knows the principles well enough, from her early education with Aunt Casta and then her later one with— well, her later one, all rushed and frightened and power-mad. It is, at its core, not an evil art - the red yarn this weaver uses doesn’t crackle, and there’s no reason the way the weft settles about the warp should seem to Glimmer like a closing trap. These days, though, Glimmer practices a more emotional kind of magic, less thoughtfully-placed strands and more glowing balls and focused intent. _Brute force,_ her dad calls it, but Glimmer doesn’t think of it like that. The magic Glimmer does these days, the way she pulls it from the core of her, she thinks it’s a bit like asking for power, instead of trapping it in a cage. 

“No thanks, dad,” she says, eyes still fixed. 

“You sure?” He asks. She nods. 

There’s a gleam in his eye, one he gets sometimes. It’s a sad kind of longing, disappointment that he can’t share something he loves with her. He doesn’t think she can see it, she knows, thinks he hides it well, and maybe he’d be right if she were younger. But she’s not younger. She notices. 

There are many things they can learn from each other now, Glimmer and her dad, old stories and power - old and new, political and magic. There are many things they can share. 

“You’d be good at it, you know,” her dad presses, just a little.

“I know,” she replies. 

But not this.

* * *

_Here is how spinning works: sometimes the light hits just right, pushes through panes of glass and past the tall pillars of Mystacor so it touches the ground, twines together in long strands, strands that reach out, thick and corded and ready to—_

_It’s night, or almost night, or daytime with the blinds closed, when the shadows in the corner of the room draw tight and lengthen, a draft blowing through the open window as those shadows curl towards—_

_Words, all twisted up - in a training room, or the garnet’s chamber, or a prison cell. “Ah, but you are like me. And just like—”_

_No._

_No._

* * *

Adora can’t stop dyeing. 

No one else finds it funny when she says that - it makes Glimmer go quiet and Catra go sharp, makes Bow glare in a way he usually never does - so she’s stopped, at least out loud. But it’s true, and it’s true in a way that creeps up on her, on all of them. It starts small - a few trips to Razz’s that turn into hours of berry-picking and a series of scattered, unsolicited lessons. Then there are haphazard projects on scraps of scavenged fabric, started in Razz’s kitchen and left to dry between the branches of a tree outside her hut. And then even later there are a lot of those, and Adora doesn’t really like how they clutter Razz’s space - not that Razz is low on space, or seems to mind, but, well, it doesn’t seem considerate. And anyway, Adora wants to see how the berry-blues and that one weird yellow plant come out on fabric canvas, wants to see it as soon as it dries, all muddy or neat or nice. Patience was never her strong suit. 

There’s a corner of her room in Bright Moon castle that she’d once used for planning - first Princess Prom, then war - and now it stores jars of herbs and plants and berries and flowers, little pieces of Etheria she collects first with Razz, then with Perfuma, and ultimately on her own peaceful forays across the various realms. Mostly, though, she sticks to the Whispering Woods, because there’s something that feels...fair, about that. This was the place on the edge of her childhood, the place where, all those years ago, she found a sword: it’s where Etheria laid its claim on her. And so it’s where she spends her time, getting to know its twists and turns just to come back and find them changed, different, but in a friendly sort of way. 

Dyeing is not the only skill she picks up, as things settle - her desk is filled with mapmaking tools; her bedside, with notes on Etheria’s rebuild - but it is, she’d say, her most useless one. Good for nothing but some pretty cloth. Still, slowly and surely, the corner in her room accumulates first bits of nature and then projects, one after another, and then she goes beyond strips of fabric, adding a set of hanging hooks for finished items and a box of plain shirts and scarves and even some of Bow’s knit pieces, done up in neutral yarn and ready to be recolored. A set of pots, an apron for splatter, some tongs, goggles, additives. A little cart so she can take projects down to the kitchen when she needs heat, then later a hot-plate rigged up by Bow, so she doesn’t have to go down at all. 

It’s the hot plate that sets Catra off. 

“Space, Adora!”

“Hmm?” Adora hums absent-mindedly, navigating around a tower of bins to tip a few more leaves into a mortar. She begins laying gently into them with the pestle, “Space? No, not for a few more months - we’ll head out when—”

“Not space!” Catra shouts, tugging the pestle out of Adora’s hands, then using it to gesticulate wildly around the room, at the burning hot surface she'd nearly (but hadn't!) tipped over, _“_ _Space!”_

Exasperated, Adora turns to her girlfriend and props her hands on her hips, “Catra, you’re not making any sense.”

Catra groans. “You,” she jabs the pestle forward, “need more space.”

Adora rolls her eyes, “Oh, don’t be so dramatic.” She turns back to her work, only to realize she can’t do anything without her pestle. She tries to swipe it back from a smug, grinning Catra, who dances out of the way, and Adora follows, tripping over the clutter first annoyed and then laughing. She doesn’t get any more work done that day, but Catra doesn’t take any further issue with her hobby, either - too distracted and then too pleased to bother. 

It takes three weeks, an increasingly snappish girlfriend, and an incident with Melog and some berries before Adora agrees to set up a studio. She tries to snag one of Bright Moon’s smaller, more out-of-the-way rooms, somewhere no one will miss. Glimmer refuses, kicks her out of the room point blank, and makes a whole production out of cleaning up one of the roomier tower offices instead. 

It’s there that she works on Bow’s yarn and Micah’s fiber and - memorably - a few of Glimmer’s cloaks, dyes and re-dyes more of Catra’s clothing than either of them can track. She decorates the walls of her new studio with strips of color, in as many shades of Etheria as she can, and when Bow and Glimmer and even Catra steal their favorites for their rooms, she replaces them with more. Razz comments on the missing colors outside her hut, one day, and so Adora puts new ones there, in soft pink and pale green and bold fuschia and delicate cream-white. And then for George and Lance, when they ask, and then in the shades of Plumeria and Salineas and the Kingdom of Snows and even Dryl, for Perfuma and Mermista and Frosta and Entrapta. She doesn’t cry when Scorpia asks for something of the New Scorpion Kingdom, and when she visits to gather materials, she finds the former Fright Zone just another place to get to know. 

And then she comes back to Bright Moon. The space her friends picked for her is on the topmost floor of the castle, big and airy and full of windows. There’s an especially large one that gives a perfect view of the sunrise, with a big wide ledge where she sits, sometimes alone and sometimes with Glimmer and sometimes with Bow but mostly with a grumpy, half-awake Catra, and watches dawn overtake the view below inch by bright inch. It’s always the same and always different, the blues of the sky and the greens of the trees and Catra, a study in black and brown and turquoise and yellow. She picks each hue out covetously, tries to match them, tries to decide what ingredients she can blend to make that cloud, or the lake’s sparkle, or Catra’s left eye. 

Giddy, she presses Catra down against the windowsill and kisses her, again and again and again, keeps her eyes open even when it’s weird just to see the blur of Catra’s freckles, turns her own face to the lake below and the forest beyond it as Catra moves to press soft lips to her neck. 

Adora has seen planets and will see more, has seen wonders and will see more of those, too. But this, this place laid out before and beneath and around her, living and breathing and safe and beautiful, bright in screaming color, is her world. Not the one she was born to - that was lost before she ever knew it - but one that’s declared itself hers. And Adora’s starting to think - herb by plant by berry, day by day, color by brilliant color, not by conquest but by something else, something kind and collaborative and joyful - that she might even get to keep it. 

* * *

_Here is how spinning works: wisps of fiber are fragile by themselves; twist them together and they become strong._

_It’s that simple._

_Which is not the same as easy._

* * *

“Fuck!” Catra snarls, “Fuck shit dammit _fuck!”_

Her voice echoes in the wide, airy hall of Mystacor, loud amid the emptiness and sharp against the big windows of gentle light. She doesn’t care especially, preoccupied with her frustration as she stares down at the mess - what a _mess_ _-_ in her lap. 

Maybe she’d flicked her fingers at the top of the spindle shaft wrong, she thinks, or she’d wound yarn around it poorly, or she’d fumbled the balance, or an overtwisted bit snapped in her fingers. Whatever it was, it happened fast, and sent the whole spindle rolling across the floor, trailing a new-made strand that twisted in on itself. No, not twisted - tangled, now, fused messily even as it unwinds from the slender shaft of the spindle.

It would be one thing if it were the first time this had happened. It would be one thing if she’d barely begun. But it wasn’t, and she hadn't - her claws itch to rip this trial to shreds, like all the ones that had come before it, but her eyes itch too because she’d been _almost done,_ and _no,_ she _isn’t_ going to cry. 

If she sniffs a little, if she digs her claws so deep into the hallway floor that she makes grooves there - well, there’s a rug she can drag over, probably. No one needs to know. 

She’s sick of fucking up, is what she is. 

And so, Catra tucks her tongue between her fangs and her claws inside her fingers, hardens herself with a very personal mix of self-loathing pride and spiteful perseverance, and gets to work. 

She picks at it, tugging at infuriatingly tiny knots and places that aren’t knots but look like knots and act like knots because somehow the fiber from one spot in the strand has fused itself to another. There’s bits where the yarn is wrapped around itself over and over and over, ones where it’s so thin it’s not even clear how to follow it. At some point, the yarn stops being yarn. It’s the tangle of it, and then the tangle of stress and futility, and then she’s holding a taser and advancing on Entrapta, and maybe if she can just unhook these three strands from each other she won’t get there this time, won’t press it to the center of Entrapta’s back. This snarl further down is the Whispering Woods, wrecked by an ever-increasing series of robots she deploys; that mess of fiber, the look in Lonnie’s eyes back in the Fright Zone’s control room. A particular knot becomes Salineas, kindling set and warships flying the Horde flag - a tug of the strand pulls it tighter, not looser, and so it lights the fires; and so Catra slides the tip of one claw in, forced calm and racing heart, trying to wedge it into the knot but not to cut, not to ruin it, not to stoke the fires higher, blazing hotter and hotter, first flaming orange and then electric red and red and red everything they touch and everything she touches and—

“Ha, found you!” 

“Ah!” Catra shouts, jumps. She feels but does not see her claw slicing straight through the bundle of yarn, which tumbles broken into her lap. Her heart still beats furiously as she whirls, snarling, “What the _fuck_ do you think you’re—"

Adora is standing there, small in comparison to the hall’s large, ornate entry. She’s in a tank top and soft shorts, framed by wide beams of light with her hair down for once and her blue eyes wide, guileless. 

She blinks them at Catra, all concern. “Are you okay? Is it - did I make you mess up?” She pads over to where Catra is half-crouched on the floor, kneels at her side and looks at the mess, “Oh no, I’m so sorry, Catra.” 

Catra still hasn’t looked down. She won’t, can’t, doesn’t want to look at anything but Adora, because her breath is still shaky and her tail still whipping, frenetic, and she can feel the loose tatters on the pads of her fingers and maybe Adora can drown out the afterimages of towns wrecked and friendships ruined, trust broken and entire worlds aflame at Catra’s own power-hungry feet. Panic wells into her throat, and she feels her hand clench in the mess in her lap, unsheathed claws cutting through the thin, fragile strands.

“Catra—" Adora starts again, worried and guilty. That’s when Catra looks down. 

No red lightning shocks from her fingertips, not even anything like it. There are no felled trees, no accusing stares. Reality does not crumble. 

She looks down, and Salineas does not burn. 

She huffs a snort, which becomes a full chuckle, genuine though maybe a little bitter. Adora looks, if anything, even more concerned. Which is understandable, because the snarled mass in Catra's lap is really quite a mess, and now Catra’s laughing a little when she says, “No really, Adora, don’t be silly,” and - wry, honest - “it’s just yarn.” 

She holds Adora’s gaze until her girlfriend gives her a smile, tentative and genuine and a little confused, and it’s so much better than anything else Catra could possibly be looking at. She has to catch her breath before she can add, “You were looking for me?”

“Wha— oh! Uh, yeah,” Adora’s flustered, red-cheeked, like she’d been distracted even though there’s nothing much in here to be distracted by (nothing except Catra, Catra thinks, warm), “Yeah, dinner’s ready, and then Bow and Glimmer said they wanted to do a sleepover tonight, and I thought maybe, if you wanted - but only if you want! I know we can all be a lot, and you’re not always—“

Catra cuts her off with a wave and a grin, already standing up. “Wouldn’t miss it,” she says, and offers Adora her hand. 

Adora takes it, and Catra tugs her to standing with just a little more force than she should, brings Adora in close just to feel her happily follow. And follow she does, kisses Catra when Catra kisses her. She does not drop their laced hands and lets Catra use them to pull her towards the door, though she pauses when Catra detours to drop her mess off in a corner of scraps. 

“You sure you don’t…?” Adora jerks her chin at the pale blue pile of fiber on the floor, all crimped in on itself. 

Catra shrugs. “It’s just yarn,” she says again, and walks away. 

Because it’s broken, sure, and she broke it. But it’s not like it’s something that matters. She likes it, for that, likes that it’s something she can wreck without fixing, that no one will care if this is how she leaves it. She likes that she can walk away from this stupid, dumb little thing, and that’s exactly what she’s going to do.

—

Except, it’s not. 

After dinner, Catra goes back to the hall, and she isn’t prepared for the wave of relief that hits her when she sees the tangled yarn right where she left it, a pale spot on the floor in Mystacor’s fading twilight. She scoops it up - spindle and all - and carries it up to the room Sparkles is staying in. There, she piles in with her friends and six blankets and at least ten pillows and a whole cake (“we’re going to _die_ _,”_ Bow says, eyeing the mountain of sugar, and “worth it!” Adora replies) and a stack of board games so high it’s practically taller than Sparkles (“Is not!” Sparkles insists, and Catra sniggers into her frosting). 

They play cards, and a pink game with too much jewelry, and a rainbow one that makes strange noises, and while they laugh and trash talk and eat, Catra works on her tangles. 

It’s intricate and painstaking and still wildly frustrating. Catra still wants to scream, a bit, but it’s easier to bear when she also wants to laugh at Bow’s increasingly unbelievable stories about his brothers, or lord her win at cards over Adora. She picks apart the tangled pieces, ties the broken bits together and, inch by meticulous inch, winds more and more repaired yarn onto the spindle’s shaft. She’s distracted, at times, and the yarn suffers for it, whole knots having to be cut out when she pulls them too tight to manage. There are more tied-together ends than there needed to be, than there would have been if she hadn’t fucked up - but it’s still not like it matters, so she decides it’s okay. It's progress. Once, she flashes out a claw and cuts the thread - intentionally, unnecessarily, violently. It’s not that satisfying, and she doesn’t do it again. 

The trick, she decides - clawtip out, tangle held close to her face, pointedly ignoring Adora’s attempts to rile her with a series of embarrassing childhood stories - is gentleness. She can’t toss it around like she does the balls of yarn Bow works with. Even those tangle when treated roughly, but not this easy, not this quick - this new-spun stuff wants to curl and snarl. It doesn’t come naturally to Catra, this soft, patient way of tugging and prodding lightly to see if a certain strand will pull the knot tighter or work it looser. But her eyes are good for the task, catching what is a knot and what is just oddly wrapped, and her claws, wielded carefully, are good for separating strands and slicing the tiny places the fiber likes to fuse to itself. 

Somewhere along the line, her friends shift away from games and into plain old conversation, rapid and loud and fun and then - as the night wears on - quiet and warm and familiar. Somewhere else along the line, Catra finds herself back to where she started, with a spindle shaft wound tight with yarn and a bag of cloud-like fluff by her side.

It takes a long time, the untangling. And then, Catra starts to spin.

There are times when it’s too thick, and there are times when she ends up with a section of wisp-thin, tenuous thread. Sometimes she spins too much too fast, and has to pull the spindle out of the bowl, tuck it under one of her legs to hold it steady while she works to distribute that twist along a new length, one that won’t curl back on itself with quite the same stubborn insistence.

This part is still about gentleness, but more about patience. Which is far less new, for Catra - it’s familiar and old, the same patience she’d had when she’d waited for each of her superiors in the Horde to fuck up, the same she’d had at dinner with Prime and Sparkles and then again, later, while Prime gave his sinister speeches and she’d watched the screen behind him, pinpointed the quadrant of Adora’s ship and wondered what she was going to do with that information, if anything. The patience is old, but hers is a brutal patience, and a partial one. For every carefully-bided moment there’s been a tasered friend; a cracked mask or a crushed bit of tech, deep grooves carved into the alien material of a table or a spaceship wall. This kind - by choice and without stakes - is new, difficult, and so much more trivial. It’s never been trivial, before. She likes that. She likes it better interrupted, surrounded by blankets and pillows and laughter. 

(“I’m going on a snack run!” Sparkles says, at one point, “pretzels for Bow and chips for Adora, got it. Catra, you want anything?...Catra? _Hey asshole, what—”_

 _“Shh_ _,"_ Bow and Adora both hiss, and Adora adds, “she likes those weird candies, the green ones,” while Bow continues, “don’t interrupt her, she’s so—“

“If you say cute,” Catra says, even and dangerous and not looking up from her work, “I will stab you through the eye with this spindle.”

A pillow hits her, spindle and all, in the face. There’s more detangling to do, after that.)

And sometimes she finds the system to it, a rhythm, where her left hand leans against the smooth, spinning wood and flicks the top of the spindle in time with her right hand, which draws the fiber out, a small line of cloud at an even thickness stretching between her fingers and the spindle until the spin, spin, spin of it presses twist up and through and the whole thing whips into a tight, single line like magic. Except it’s not magic at all, Catra knows - it’s fiber and air and twist, a bit of dark streaked along where a few strands of her hair got caught up in it, a blonde one where Adora got too close, some dust and some dirt and some glitter from its tumbles on the floor. It casts a shadow but is not made of them; it brightens in the light but is not made of that, either. It’s simple and has no power and doesn’t stand for anything at all, and it makes her smile. It’s something she can make or wreck or make poorly and no one will care, and so when she chooses to finish it it isn’t penance, it’s just...nice.

This is where Catra is when she gets to the end of her fiber, the last bit of fluff slipping through her fingers and flick-spin-twisting its way into taut solidity. She’s almost surprised to find her one hand empty and her other holding a spindle wrapped full with yarn. She is definitely surprised to find that her friends have fallen asleep around her, that Bow is curled on his side beside Sparkles, who is starfished on her back with her arm thrown out under his neck, her hand ending right by Adora’s head. Adora herself is curled around Catra’s hips and back, head resting on Catra's knee and blonde hair touched gold by the first rays of dawn light that push through the very bottom of the blinds. 

Catra’s sudden stillness must rouse her, because Adora snuffles a little at Catra’s thigh and her eyes flutter just the barest bit open, bleary.

“S’okay?” She slurs, and then at Catra’s hum of affirmation, “y’done with the, mmm, spinnin’?”

“Not quite,” Catra murmurs absently, busying herself with tucking the loose end of yarn in, “I have to make another one of these, and then Micah says I need to spin _those_ together, the other way, and then—” 

She notices Adora’s smile softening and eyes doing a close-open-close dance, like she’s trying to listen against the pull of unconsciousness. It’s sweet and lovely and thoughtful, and Catra’s heart does its own spin in her chest at the sight. She says, “I’ll tell you all about it in the morning, ‘kay?”

“S’already morning,” Adora murmurs, but that doesn’t stop her from closing her eyes again.

Catra grins down at her, sets the spindle and it’s bowl aside. She squirms down to press a kiss to Adora’s hairline. “Go back to sleep,” she says, soft. 

“You too,” comes the warm, fading response.

Here is how Catra falls asleep: stretched out in the space between Adora and Bow, Adora’s arm curled around her waist, Bow’s warmth a line against her back. Her tail drapes over his side onto Glimmer's hip, and Glimmer's arm runs under Bow’s neck, fingers just brushing Catra’s ear. Adora breathes soft against Catra’s collarbone and Catra purrs and the sun casts thin morning rays on the four of them, all tangled up, if that’s the right word. 

Except, of course, it’s not.

**Author's Note:**

> Me, usually: how do I make my opening interesting and engaging enough that it draws my reader in? Time to work on this obsessively and strategically for hours.  
> Me, on this fic: here are 900 WORDS EXPLAINING MY FAVORITE FIBER ART you will LIKE IT or you will LEAVE 
> 
> A few additional notes, should you choose to accept them:  
> -Catra really should have learned on a drop spindle bc they’re def easier for most people...BUT I imagine her sitting on the ground with a support spindle, so support spindle it is. Anyway, since when has Catra ever done anything the easy way?  
> -Bow absolutely makes Catra a minifig, it just takes a while. He needs a break first.  
> -Glimmer does not have anything but respect for people who do weaving or weaving-adjacent magicks (so long as they're, like, decent people otherwise obvs), she's just off that train for life.  
> -I am both deeply oversimplifying and unrepentantly glossing over how plant dyes work and the many considerations to take into account when creating and using them, for three reasons. The first is that all that gets pretty technical, and I decided to spend my allowance of technicality on spinning. The second is that I don’t know dyeing nearly as well as some of the other arts I describe here. The third and most important is that this is a fantasy universe, with fantasy animals and - vitally - fantasy plants, which means that if I say it’s simple in this universe it just can be.  
> -Yes, it does drive Adora nuts that natural Etherian sheep fiber is blue. Dyeing it yellow is damn near impossible.  
> -Melog is not in that last section because they are hanging out with Swift Wind at their monthly familiars-only book club where they drink apple juice and bitch about Catra and Adora. Melog is, however, still feeling Catra’s emotions, so it’s really agitated bitching this month.  
> -This fic was inevitable; it’s been coming ever since they gave Shadow Weaver a fiber arts naming theme (...so, since the 80s)  
> -If you want to come say hi and talk about the bfs or catradora or yarn or all of the above, I have a poorly kept tumblr under the name ostensiblyarticulate.


End file.
